


Just Hang On For A Minute, I've Got Something To Say

by ialpiriel



Series: Sad Baby LW [4]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Dr. Li POV, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, James Is A Bad Dad, Mental Health Issues, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 19:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11927574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ialpiriel/pseuds/ialpiriel
Summary: Clearly, the Lone Wanderer isn't doing so hot. Clearly, James is not making it better.





	Just Hang On For A Minute, I've Got Something To Say

**Author's Note:**

> title is from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNmo8I4dEQE)

Alex is asleep on the pile of rotting mattresses in the corner, propped against the wall, snoring, a plain bottle loosely clutched in one hand.

“James,” Madison says, low. James glances up from his terminal, then looks back down.

“Yes, Madison?” he asks.

“She’s drinking. Heavily.”

“She’s under stress. A lot of it. I’ll talk with her tomorrow.” He keeps watching his terminal readout as it clicks along. “I’m surprised you would comment.”

Madison takes a long moment to chew that one over. 

He clearly hasn’t changed.

No wonder the poor kid drinks.

“I’ve had fifty years to get bitter. She’s not even twenty.”

“I’ll speak with her tomorrow,” James repeats, and they both lapse into silence again.

***

James is gone, somewhere in the bowels of the machinery, when Alex mumbles her way awake. Madison is still at her terminal--she slept for three hours last night, and she had taken one hit of Jet when she had gotten up--and she looks up at Alex as Alex shuffles herself into a more comfortable sitting position and takes a drink out of the bottle, pulls a face.

“Alex,” Madison says, not loud--kid looks hungover as hell. She doesn't need loud noises right now. “How are you feeling?”

Alex looks at the door--it’s open, out into the rest of the building--and watches for a long ten seconds before she answers.

“Bad,” she says, and takes another drink, looks Madison in the eyes.

“There’s a water cooler back there--” She jerks a thumb over her shoulder, at the closet they stored all their food and water in back then, and have started storing it there again, “--and there’s some food. Your father said he’d talk to you about how much you’re drinking, after I brought it up with him last night.”

Alex grunts, takes another drink. 

“Where is he?” she asks, when she sets the bottle aside and goes to get up. She grunts, rolls her shoulders, pulls another face.

“Checking pipes. He won’t be back for…” Madison trails off, looks around the room for a clock. “Maybe another hour or two.”

“Alright.” Alex stands, stretches again. “Do you need me for anything today?”

“I think we should be good for today, though if you're going to go out, i wouldn’t mind having you back tonight in case we need you tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Alex runs a hand back over her hair, scratches at something on her scalp and inspects her fingernails when she pulls her hand away. “Okay. I’ll probably be back late. I’ll try to be quiet.”

“Where are you going?” Madison asks.

Alex studies her for a moment.

“I think I’ll head back to Megaton, just check in on my house and my dog. Asked Moira to look after him if I was ever gone for more than a day and she said she would. Figure I should go check in on him and made sure she didn’t give him a second head or something.” Alex forces a weak laugh, rubs the back of her neck.

“Could you pick us up a few groceries while you’re there?” Madison asks. “Just some food for the next few days.” She pauses a moment, moves a paper aside. She doesn’t want to lecture Alex on substance abuse. It’d be the pot calling the kettle black, she’s not going to lie to herself about it, and Alex knows too. “Bring your dog, too, if you’d like. We could use a project pet.” She smiles at Alex, who gives her a serious look back.

“I’ll be back tonight,” she says, after an uncomfortably long silence. “I’ll bring groceries.”

“Thank you.” Madison smiles again, and Alex turns around, gathers her things, and leaves, all without another word.

***

James doesn’t notice.

Or, he notices Alex is gone, asks where she is, and on hearing that she’s on her way to Megaton to get food and her dog, nods like that’s the right thing for Alex to be doing, and then he goes back to his readout. He doesn’t ask again, goes to bed late, starts snoring almost immediately.

Madison can feel herself flagging, but she can’t convince herself to sleep before Alex gets back.

Alex gets back late, one knee newly bandaged, backpack full of food, dog at her heels. Madison can see her coming up the road, from where she’s sitting outside, above the door, smoking a cigarette. 

“Alex,” she calls, when Alex is finally close enough to year her, but still doesn't seem to have noticed her. It’s a clear night, not hard to see in, but Alex is walking stranger than even a bum knee should dictate, amd doesn't seem to see anything much.

Alex startles, swings wildly. She stands there, fists at her side, for just a moment, breathing hard, when she doesn’t hit anything.

“Alex,” Madison calls again, and waves.

Alex focuses on her, slowly, and then cautiously waves back.

“He’s asleep,” Madison calls next, and Alex ponders this for a long moment before she nods.

“I brought food,” she says.

“Thank you,” Madison says. Alex is clearly intoxicated--drunk, most likely--and there’s no point in trying to have any talk with her here and now. “Let’s go inside.”

Alex goes willingly, and the two of them unpack the food into the pantry. Madison escorts Alex to her bed, then goes back outside to finish her cigarette.

She sleeps easy, even as, twenty feet away, Alex tosses and turns, mumbles in her sleep, cries out a few times. Madison wakes a few times in the night, but never for long, and she slips back under quickly.

When she wakes for real, both James and Alex are gone from the room. Janice is manning the readouts, a stack of coffee cups nearby. The dog Alex brought back is stretched out on his side, chest rising and falling evenly. it takes her a moment to wake up the rest of the way, hear the voices out in the other room.

“It’s causing problems, Alexandra,” is the first full sentence she hears, from James.

There is no response from Alex.

“You understand why I’m worried?” he asks, and it sounds like it’s something he’s said a thousand times before, like it’s something he expects Alex to already know the answer to. 

“Yes,” she says, meek. This isn’t the kid who showed up in her lab, asked her questions until she got an answer, punched her way through the super mutants here with a powerfist and a prayer, not the kid who leans on the counter of the Galley to shoot the shit with traders. This is a kid James has browbeaten into compliance.

“I don’t want you falling in with dangerous people and getting hurt. I’ve already lost so much, I couldn’t stand to lose you too.”

_Could stand it enough to leave her behind with a power-hungry maniac with a grudge_ , Madison thinks to herself, hauls herself out of bed. 

‘I’m sorry,” Alex says. It sounds contrite, mostly. It also sounds like she’s trying to get him to hurry up.

“Thank you. I don’t want you drinking today, you understand?”

“Yes, Dad,” Alex agrees, and Madison can almost hear the desperate let-me-out in her voice. Poor kid.

“Good. I’ll need you for a job later today, but first we’re going to get rid of any chems you have with you.”

They’re still standing out in the other room, neither of them moving--she assumes James is waiting for pushback. 

Janice glances over, and Madison scrambles across the floor. Cold turkey sucks, and she won’t inflict it on Alex if she doesn’t have to.

She has to leave something behind, so that James can feel like he did something, made a real change in her life, but she can’t leave the kid twisting in the wind, either.

Two bottles of Buffout--leave one, cram the other up under her shirt to muffle the rattle. Janice takes her cue, goes to intercept james before he and Alex--still conspicuously quiet--can enter the room. 

She finds the syringes of Psycho, next--grabs all of them, shoves them aside under her blanket until she can find a better place to hide them. Janice has James distracted now, so she has a little more time.

A reused clear whiskey bottle, full of something cloudy, and three unopened whiskey bottles. Not any of the good stuff, but it’s stuff that will get you drunk, which she supposes is really the goal here. Leave one bottle of whiskey. James sounds exasperated over whatever Janice is talking to him about.

A dozen syringes of Med-X--god, how does this kid poop, if she’s on that many opiates, Jesus. Leaves two. James and Janice are talking more quietly now, not so tense, but James is getting more insistent.

The last thing she finds is a paper envelope of blunts. She takes the whole thing, tucks it away with everything else under the same carefully arranged blanket on a nearby bed that’s not Alex’s. James is demanding he be let into the room to deal with Alex’s drug problem, before he fields Janice’s questions, and Madison scrambles back across the room, starts putting her hair up, like she just woke up and hasn’t done anything else this morning. Janice has to let them in.

“Empty out your backpack,” James says, stands in the middle of the room, ignoring Janice--who stands at her terminal wringing her hands and scanning the output for anything to talk about--and Madison--who progresses to changing into a less-rumpled shirt, her back still turned to the others. Alex kneels over her backpack, and Madison closes her eyes.

There’s no hesitation, on Alex's part, thank god--she’s sober enough to roll with it. She has to know that’s less than what she brought, but she’s smart enough to know that admitting to having more won’t make this easier.

James had made a disappointed remark, yesterday, about how much _potential_ she’d had as a child--he had called her _Alexandra_ and it had seemed so cold, so impersonal, so much like a disappointed teacher or boss complaining about a slacking employee. _She could have done so well, but she--_ he would start, and she would tune him out.

She’s smarter than she let on, apparently. James, too blinded by his ambition to look at the world around him, just like always.

One bottle of Buffout that rattles loudly, the _clink-slosh_ of a bottle of whiskey, two tiny plastic _click_ s as she sets down the Med-X syringes.

“Is that all of it?” James asks.

“Yes,” Alex replies, so meek, so beaten-down, so resigned, Madison almost believes she’s telling the truth. Almost.

“Alright. Let’s go. Bring it with. Janice, we’ll be back momentarily.”

Alex gathers up the chems she pulled from her backpack, follows James out the door, head lowered. Madison waits until she hears the door close behind them.

“Throw in a wrong variable,” Madison orders Janice. “Somewhere unexpected. I’m going to stash these chems before they come back.”

“Was that the right thing to do?” Janice asks, eyes wide.

“If we don’t want her seeing pink elephants and curled up on the floor puking, yes,” Madison replies, gathers the blanket of cehms up and escorts it to the pantry, where she shuffles them all into a metal lockbox. It’s been sitting on the floor since they moved in the first time, and back then it had nothing but a few rotted-through papers in it. It’s been empty since then.

“It’s throwing errors,” Janice calls back.

“Break it some more,” Madison replies.

She locks the lockbox, shoves the key between her teeth as she changes into a different pair of pants, too. She slips the key in her pocket.

Out in the other room, she hears the two of them come back inside. James is loud--so loud, Alex looked like hell when she was in here just a minute ago, what she really needs right now is probably a stiff drink and somewhere quiet. Take the edge off, let it all blow over.

“I don’t want to see you with any more chems while we work together.”

“Okay,” Alex agrees.

Madison finds her own bottle of whiskey from a bottom drawer, takes a swig. She’s gonna need it for today, looks like.

***

She passes Alex the key over lunch, when James is in the rotunda, pacing.

“Use it now,” Madison murmurs. “I doubt you'll be left alone the rest of the day. It’s the lockbox in the pantry.”

“You-” Alex starts.

“Yes,” Madison says, cuts Alex off. “I’ve been in your shoes. Go stop the DTs before they start. Just be careful he won't notice.”

“Thank you,” Alex stage whispers, and scurries off to the pantry.

Theres the sound of an unscrewing lid, then the pop of a plastic needle cap, no other noises until Alex emerges. She doesn't seem perkier, really, but hopefully whatever she did in there will help.

“I won't talk to him about it anymore,” Madison says. “Maybe I shouldn’t have in the first place.”

“It’s okay,” Alex says, and her mouth twists into something sour. “Everyone always worships the ground he walks on, you're already different, just ‘cause you apologized for making it worse.”

The kid is exhausted--she looks like she could use a few hits of Jet herself, though with the cocktail she’s already working with, Jet might be a bad idea--and Madison can hear the edge of bitterness in her voice.

How badly did he have to fuck up for his own child to talk this way about him?

“Once the purifier is running, I’d like to talk to you. Until then, do whatever you need to keep functioning.”

“Thanks, Dr. Li.” Alex smiles at her, and it's sad and bitter and tired.

***

Things go sideways very, very quickly.

***

The Brotherhood keeps Alex in an exam room, wraps her fingers in splints--she broke six on a succession of Enclave officers, hadn’t noticed until she had come down off the three shots of Psycho and short of Med-X she had given herself in the tunnels. She had handed five stimpaks over to Garza without a moment of hesitation, and now they have him in a recovery room, resting.

The rest of them wait in an empty meeting room, looking at each other.

Eventually Alex comes in, walking unsteadily, stripped of armor and weapons. Her jeans are still soaked from the thunderstorm, her hair speedily tied back under a scarf but also clearly wet and tangled, half her face swelling with bruises, her lip split. She looks like hell, and she settles into an empty chair, eyes lowered, hands tucked into her lap. Someone gave her a new shirt to replace the one the soldier with a ripper destroyed, and it’s just a size too small.

They all talk, and get shuffled around, and Alex is the last to leave the room, just behind Madison.

“Come with me,” Madison says, tugs gently on Alex’s bicep. “There was a stash of chems in the sleeping quarters. if we’re lucky, it’ll still be there.”

They’re lucky.

Some of it is expired, but Alex grabs at the Med-X before anything else, and Madison lets her work. She uncorks the bottle of wine--2250 vintage, from somewhere up north--and takes a drink herself. She passes it to Alex when Alex turns her attention back to her present company. She’s awkward, with all her splinted fingers, but she takes her drink and passes it back.

“So what do I do now?” she asks.

“Up to you,” Madison replies, takes another drink. She passes the bottle back, and they both lapse into silence again.

***

Madison is walking past a lab just off the Liberty Room when she hears Alex’s voice, and slows. She hasn’t seen the kid since last night, when they finished off the bottle of wine and Alex took a bottle of absinthe back to bed with her.

She doesn’t catch what the other woman says, but she does catch the venom in Alex’s voice.

“He died as he lived, a selfish asshole,” she snaps. There’s the edge of a slur in her words, and something unsteady that sounds like more than alcohol.

“Then you did not know the man. I knew your father--”

“Didn’t know him?” Alex yells. She’s on the edge of tears, and Madison starts moving again. God, she never thought she’d have to babysit Catherine and James’s daughter, too, after babysitting the two of them. Maybe she shouldn’t have expected better. “He’s my father, I know him better than you! I spent nineteen years with him!” Madison catches a sob from Alex, and Alex’s voice is broken, wobbly, slurred, when she continues. “And he spent all of them ignoring me except to tell me I fucked up, and now he dies after he spends a whole day telling me the only thing that _helps_ makes me a bad person.”

There’s a stretching silence, broken only by awful, wet, snorting sobs from Alex.

“I don’t wanna hear about _him_ and how _great_ he is anymore,” she snarls.

The silence stretches longer, and then there's another wet snort, and Alex comes stomping out of the room, scrubbing at her eyes.

Madison grabs her by the arm, steers her away from the rest of the lab, into a truly-empty room. The lights flicker on from the movement.

“Get off me,” Alex snarls, yanks her arm away. “Don’t touch me.”

“Take some time to cool off,” Madison says, starts digging through her pockets for a handkerchief, some tissues, a scrap of cloth, anything to give this poor kid. 

“Why should I listen to you?” Alex demands. God, what is the kid on? Psycho, probably, if Madison is going to be honest with herself.

“Just take a minute,” Madison repeats, and finally finds a linty bandana in a white coat pocket. She holds it out to Alex, who reluctantly takes it. “Do some, I don’t know. Breathing exercises.”

She watches Alex from the corner of her eye--she’s seen junkies on Psycho, they’ll overreact to anything they think is a threat, and if this kid is this far gone, who knows what will happen when. Better to let her work it off on her own.

“They don’t know,” Alex says, and it’s not meek, tis not retiring, it’s just--fact.

“Don’t know what?” Madison asks. She knows. She heard the outburst.

“They don’’t know how he _acted_ ,” Alex clarifies, says it a little like she thinks Madison is stupid. Maybe she is, for asking. Maybe she is, for making Alex say the thing they both already knew. “They all just think he’s--he’s perfect. No one ever asks what it was like.”

She looks to Madison now, cheeks still damp, swiping at her nose with the back of her hand, but no longer sobbing. She’s hoping for--something. She wants something.

“Let’s go back to my room, and we can talk.” She gives Alex a stiff smile. She suspects this will not be a fun and pleasant conversation.

She might need to hear it, though.

Someone should listen.

Alex gives her a cautious look.

“You really mean it?” she asks, turns her head so she looks at Madison from the corner of her eye. 

“I do. Let’s go.” She waves Alex along, and Alex pats at her face a little more, sticks close as they head up to the sleeping areas.


End file.
